Freely available Unicode fonts

BabelStone Tibetan

BabelStone Tibetan is a Unicode Tibetan font. It is a modification and extension of the Jomolhari font. Jomolhari is a Bhutanese style calligraphic uchen Tibetan script font developed in Bhutan by Christopher J. Fynn, and licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). I would like to express my immense gratitude to Chris for designing such a beautiful font, and releasing it under a free license that allows me to modify it and release it under the BabelStone brand.

BabelStone Tibetan is based on Jomolhari Version alpha 0.003c 2006, which is quite old, and so does not include sixteen characters added to the Tibetan block in Unicode versions 5.1 (2008), 5.2 (2009) and 6.0 (2010). BabelStone Tibetan adds support for these sixteen characters, and also extends the font to cover many additional stack clusters, including non-standard clusters that are used for writing Tibetan shorthand contractions and some unusual clusters that were used for transcribing Tangut. If there are any stack clusters you need that BabelStone Tibetan does not currently support, please let me know by email or on twitter, and I will endeavour to promptly add them to the font. Please note that the current release (10.000) is the first public release of the font, and there are a number of known limitations and defects which I hope to fix in the future.

Adobe InDesign CS3 & CS4

There is a special version of the Jomolhari font called "Jomolhari ID" available, designed to work only in Adobe's InDesign (CS3 & CS4) on both Windows and Mac. InDesign CS3 and CS4 has its own OpenType shaping engine which does not have specific support for Tibetan script. The font works by using lookups under "generic" OpenType features which are applied by InDesign's shaping engine ~ rather than the features specified for Tibetan which InDesign's shaping engine does not apply. This also enables the font to work in a number of Macintosh applications.

Sambhota: TsugRing and YigChung

Sambota Tibetan Schools Society Dharamshala has created two new Unicode fonts as of August 2010: Tibetan TsugRing (OTF) and Tibetan Sambhota Yigchung (TTF).

They can be downloaded from

currently unavailable:SamBhota.org/sambhota-tibetan-unicode-fonts/[page works, download links "not found" - aug 2016] with samples, as well as information about compatibility and keyboards. (Samples and useful information are there, but as of 27 august 2016 the download links for the two fonts get "not found". We are contacting Sambhota to find out.)

PKTC: Tibetan Machine Uni

The fonts of Tibetan Computer Company (TCC) by Tony Duff are renowned for being some of the most beautiful, high-quality Tibetan fonts available. They are all in dbu can style; TCC are not planning to produce dbu med fonts "until the Windows operating system can support them properly."

PKTC "typefaces are available in two encoding formats: non-unicode and unicode. We continue to support our own, non-unicode format for Tibetan because, unfortunately, the Tibetan Unicode standard does not support many of the specialized characters needed for serious work in the Tibetan language."

TCC "typefaces are available in two encoding formats: non-unicode and unicode. We continue to support our own, non-unicode format for Tibetan because, unfortunately, the Tibetan Unicode standard does not support many of the specialized characters needed for serious work in the Tibetan language."

Mac OS-X Unicode fonts

Why are Mac Unicode fonts in a different section?

Unfortunately both Mac OS-X 10.5 and 10.6 (which supports Tibetan) and Adobe's programs support a different set of OpenType features which are required to correctly render Tibetan glyphs. So far Chris Fynn'sJomolhari ID font is the only publicly-available font that supports all platforms. The other fonts listed above run only with Windows and Linux, and the Mac fonts below run only with Mac OS-X. See Platform Independent Tibetan Unicode Fonts for the internal encoding differences.

Legacy fonts (non-Unicode)

Why switch to Unicode?

There still exist quite a number of high-quality Tibetan fonts which do not support the Unicode standard. Since they rely on proprietary encoding, they often only work in a well-defined and closed environment. That makes it difficult to work with standard software:

* For legacy fonts, standard word processors like OpenOffice or Microsoft word do not understand boundaries of Tibetan syllables and might break syllables in wrong places.

* Desktop search engines cannot search Tibetan in legacy encodings.

* It is very difficult to change fonts; special conversion software is needed.

* Files might not be readable in the future because they use proprietary encoding.

External Links

Note

The builder of this page does not have extensive knowledge of Tibetan fonts, and has only collated this info from other sources. It would be most helpful if you have more information, to send it here, and i will be able to change it.